Good examples and good practices

The modern Hungarian settlement was identified by the two initiators – Pál Beke and Tamás Varga A. (from 1975) – as an ‘open cultural home’. This institution also evolved from a settlement type activity and idea to become a centre of local self-organisation. The ‘open house’ experiment was joined by cultural homes and professionals whoContinue reading

In addition to cooperation in practice the institution’s socialisation may result in the given community’s problems, plans, routines and conflicts appearing in the institution’s day-to-day operations. There is nothing new about this in the museum sector either. The need for radical changes in museums, as a social institution, and for their undertaking more profound socialContinue reading

In the library institution system, it was a long way from community initiatives, through libraries for special groups of readers, associations, societies, circles, commercial lending libraries and the social libraries run by the state, to citizen’s public libraries. Or, likewise, from the educating and entertaining people’s library through cultural libraries to today’s service provider libraryContinue reading

The Mag-ház (Seed House), created in the town of Komárom, is a community space operating on the basis of the model of “the desired system of community education”. It is run by the organisation that is the owner of the building (Élettér Egyesület, Living Space Association) and a consortium of another five organisations, based onContinue reading

Settlement (as the English word is used as technical term borrowed by the Hungarian language) is one of the oldest forerunners of the socialised institutional mode of operation. A ‘settlement’ could today be described, on the one hand, as a community development centre and on the other hand, as a multifunctional integrated human public serviceContinue reading

A pioneering museum project was launched in the 1990s by the Glasgow Museum Service. The aim of the Open Museum project was to make the museum more open and committed to local communities. Based on earlier museum-focused exhibitions organised for communities the then director of the Glasgow Museum proposed that local communities should be permittedContinue reading